Chapter 35 #2
There are sixty seconds in a minute, and I feel every last one of them as she waits for me to speak. Tick, tick, tick. It’s a tactic. She thinks that if she doesn’t talk, I will. It’s not going to work. This is a standoff, and I’m not going to lose.
“We can end there today if you’d like,” she finally says. “I don’t mind.”
“Okay.”
“What are your plans for today?” Helen asks.
“I don’t know. Probably rot on Charlotte’s couch and watch Gilmore Girls.”
She smiles. “Rest. Talk. Process. Recover. In whatever order you want, on your own terms. I’m not going to force this.”
As I stand to leave, she adds one last thing. “Austin, you’re very vulnerable right now. Look for ways to release the pain and the pressure,” she says. “Small steps, small wins.”
—
Are you still there?
The message pops up on the TV, wondering if I’m still alive, interrupting Jess, in a denim jacket, shouting his famous line, “Why did you drop out of Yale?!”
I watch the screen, my body slumped on the couch. I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep for the past I don’t know how long.
The remote is just out of reach, all the way on the coffee table, and I simply don’t have the willpower to move my arm to pick it up. A few days ago I was dashing across Grand Slam courts, and now I can barely order delivery.
Am I still here? Yup. Do I want to be? I don’t know.
Lately, in my darkest moments, I’ve picked up the fun new habit of circling back to a certain message. I scroll down to the thread, pull up the text again.
so proud of u
I stare at it so long that it doesn’t look like words at all.
“Proud,” I say to myself, over and over again, my head smashed against the sequins of Charlotte’s pillow as I glare at Jake’s tiny face at the top of the screen.
I’m sure I look unhinged. I feel unhinged.
I repeat the word until it loses all meaning.
“Proooouud.”
He wasn’t proud of me when it counted, so he doesn’t get to be now.
I still can’t believe he fucking sent that.
And worse, I can’t believe I’m considering responding.
Dark times indeed. Am I thinking that a conversation would lead to an apology from him?
Am I starved for attention? Am I really that worthless?
Not gonna answer that one.
These are all great questions for my therapist, honestly, but I’m pretty sure I know what Helen would tell me to do, and I can do it without her advice.
I swipe, and my thumb hovers over the red trash can icon.
I can erase everything we ever had—years of friendship and flirting and failure—with just one…
Tap.
Small steps, small wins.
I exhale. There. Deleted. I did a good thing today. Now I can do a bad one.
Outside the window, an orange sunset paints the building across the street.
Charlotte won’t be back for a few hours.
New York Fashion Week is in full swing, and she described her life as being “practically over” for the next few days.
She invited me to her event tonight, but I not so politely declined.
I’ve already proven that I can’t handle myself very well at those.
Plus, I have to rest. Doctor’s orders. The corner of my phone says it’s six fifty-seven p.m., which means I have a decision to make.
I’ve done everything I can to forget about Diego.
He seems to be doing the same for me—no texts, no calls—and I don’t know what seeing him again would do to me, but as the time moves a minute closer to seven, I feel a gravitational pull.
My hand reaches toward the coffee table, the silver remote like a drug I’m afraid to take.
There’s no one here to judge me. Everyone would tell me it’s a bad idea.
Don’t invite him back into your mind. But I need to see how this ends.
I need to see him living out my dream—the dream I left dead on the court two nights ago.
I search through Charlotte’s streaming apps for ESPN, hoping I don’t find it, but I know I will. She and Mom subscribe to every tennis app ever invented, to keep up with my matches.
Why does everyone have to be so goddamn supportive.
“Cruz is probably feeling fresh as a daisy, only played two sets on Sunday—under unfortunate circumstances, of course, but that’s a huge advantage coming into tonight,” a commentator says as the match starts to stream. I just turned this shit on and my ghost is already haunting the place.
The TV cuts to a shot in the tunnel, a close-up of Diego’s opponent, Miles Wentworth, a British guy with a pretty face and a Burberry contract.
Is he the one? Is he the secret hookup? Did Diego go back to him?
I’ve played this guessing game about every guy on tour since Diego delivered that fun piece of news.
He’s got me out here solving mysteries like an actual Hardy Boy.
I hate it, but I can’t help myself. I can’t help the jealousy.
Behind Wentworth’s chiseled jaw, Diego stands, zoned in and ready. My stomach drops when the camera locks on his face. Am I really going to be able to take three hours of this, maybe more? I’ll turn it off when Charlotte gets here. That’s how I rationalize it.
But I don’t follow my directions.
Wrapping up now, do you want Shake Shack? she texts me an hour later.
I tell her I’m going to sleep, and I finish Diego’s quarterfinal match in the darkness of my room, eyes glued to the screen, eyes glued to him. I can’t look away—just like he can’t lose.
—
Days pass like weeks. Every morning I wake up, make myself a decaf Nespresso, and stare out the window at the construction across the street, wondering why I’m here.
My next session with Helen goes just about as well as the last one.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I don’t want to talk about anything.
I just want to sit and rot with my thoughts.
This whole week was supposed to be about getting quality time with her, in person, face-to-face, but it’s turning into a huge waste of time.
Helen suggested that I try activities that don’t involve a screen.
Too tired to fight her about anything, I agreed, and I picked up a new book on the way home.
I scoured the shelves at the Strand for an hour, looking for a story that wouldn’t remind me of anything at all—no romance, no sports, no dead parents…
Why is it so hard to find a book without dead parents?
I finally settled on a small book of poetry that probably has at least two of those things, but at least they’ll be hidden in flowery language.
And maybe I’ll look smart and mysterious reading it in the coffee shop next to Charlotte’s apartment—which is where I sit now, with everyone else in the neighborhood who has nothing else to do on a Friday.
My phone buzzes with a text in my pocket. I can’t even make it through the first page of this book without getting distracted.
How are you feeling today?
Robbie has texted me every day. Sometimes I text back, sometimes I don’t—depends on my mood. I’m not in charge of making him feel less guilty for leaving me here, for blowing off the rest of the year. Maybe he should get a therapist and deal with it.
But today I reply. Maybe I’m bored with the poetry. Maybe I want the excuse to check my phone. Maybe I miss him. ok today, had helen this morning
Glad to hear it. How’d it go? he responds.
It was a waste of fucking time, Rob. Therapy was a bad idea. We sat there and stared at each other for twenty minutes, until we found a topic I was okay talking about.
it was fine, I say instead.
Are you watching Cruz tonight?
He hasn’t asked me about Diego all week. He’s probably scared that that would push me away further.
To no one’s surprise, Diego’s winning streak has taken him all the way to the semifinals tonight. All his dreams are coming true, just as planned.
nah ill be busy with char, I text him back.
Maybe I’ll be strong enough for that to actually be true.
Thirty minutes later, I check my phone expecting to find a reply, but he left it alone.
—
On top of my daily boredom and my shitty therapy sessions, I can barely sleep.
Charlotte’s roommate’s bed is one of the most comfortable things I’ve ever experienced.
It has some expensive memory foam mattress that wraps around your body and swallows you into its depths.
On normal nights it would knock me out cold, but these nights aren’t normal.
The AC wheezes and rattles against the window, sirens wail down the street, and voices from the sidewalk enter the room like strangers.
When I do fall asleep, I wake up an hour later, in a pool of sweat. I tell myself it’s because of the heat.
When my anxiety started to get really bad, right around the time Dad started to noticeably decline, there were weeks at a time when I couldn’t sleep through the night.
My brain was too loud. I’d be lying in bed, doing absolutely nothing, and I wouldn’t be able to catch my breath.
I’d try to kick the feeling out of me—I’d sit up in bed, throw my arms against my mattress, will my chest to move up and down, desperate for air, desperate for the thoughts to fade.
I discovered that I could drown myself out by listening to a podcast. Someone else talking could calm the chatter in my brain. And if the subject captures my interest enough, I’m out before I know it.
This hack better work tonight.
I groan, mustering the strength to reach my phone on the bedside table. I’m gonna have to go for the hard stuff—true crime, something scary and murdery that demands my attention. But as my phone lights up, something else demands it.
It’s two a.m. and I have three missed calls, all in a row, from fifteen minutes ago. I didn’t hear the phone’s vibration over the AC.
I jolt up, squinting at the blue light of my phone. There’s no way I’m seeing what I think I am.
Why did Diego call me three times?
I frantically check my DMs, my texts, and my voicemail for any context or clues. Nothing. Just straight-up phone calls, three of them, in the middle of the fucking night. What the hell does this mean? What the hell does he want?
He doesn’t deserve a callback from me. He can’t just pick and choose when he wants to talk. But something feels off about this. Something feels wrong. Usually, a flurry of late-night calls doesn’t mean things are going well. And I start to worry. I can’t help it. It’s a special talent.
My thumb hovers over the screen. It’s not like I can fall asleep now. I need to find out what’s going on.